SharePoint: The Bear Grylls of Enterprise Software

2026/03/02 by Stefan Bauer

After 25 years, SharePoint is still here. Let that sink in. In a world where entire technology categories rise and vanish within a single hype cycle, it’s still evolving, still adapting, still indispensable.

As someone who has spent a large part of my career designing and developing for SharePoint and Microsoft 365, I’ve watched countless technologies get proclaimed as “the future” while SharePoint quietly absorbed features, adapted, and moved on. So I thought it would be fun (and slightly sobering) to compile what SharePoint has actually outlasted, outpaced, or refused to be replaced by.

The “SharePoint Killers”

Let’s start with the platforms that were supposed to replace it. Every few years, a new contender enters the ring:

Google Sites, multiple versions, still underwhelming for enterprise use
Dropbox for Business / Box, tried to expand beyond file storage into platform territory, but never matched SharePoint’s breadth
Facebook Workplace (2016–2026), Meta is decommissioning it this year to focus on AI and the metaverse
Confluence and Notion deserve a mention here, not because they failed, but because they’re often positioned as SharePoint alternatives. Both are strong products, but they serve different audiences. Neither has replaced SharePoint’s combination of document management, intranets, workflows, lists, search, and deep integration with the Microsoft stack

That combination is hard to replicate, even if each piece isn’t best-in-class.

Collaboration Rivals That Faded

SharePoint started as a collaboration tool, and it outlived most of the competition in that space:

Google Wave (2009–2012) was supposed to reinvent communication. Announced in May 2009 to huge excitement, shut down by Google in August 2010 after failing to gain traction, and fully decommissioned in April 2012
Jive Software, enterprise social before it was cool, then before it was dead
IBM Connections, IBM’s social platform that never gained the traction it needed
Yahoo! Groups (2001–2020), outlived by SharePoint by a wide margin
Google+ (2011–2019), Google’s most famous social failure
Microsoft Groove, acquired in 2005, renamed to SharePoint Workspace, then quietly discontinued

A special note on IBM/Lotus Notes & Domino: it would be unfair to call this one dead. HCL acquired it from IBM in 2019 and continues to develop (v14.5 shipped in June 2025) actively. But its market position has fundamentally changed. What was once the default enterprise collaboration platform is now a niche player, largely maintained for legacy customers. SharePoint didn’t kill it, but it certainly overtook it.

Web Technologies That Came and Went

This list is especially relevant if you build for the web, as I do. SharePoint survived every single one of these:

Microsoft FrontPage (1997–2006), once the default way to edit SharePoint sites
Adobe Flash (1996–2020), powered the web for over a decade, now gone
Microsoft Silverlight (2007–2015) was supposed to be the Flash killer
Microsoft InfoPath (2003–2014), forms before PowerApps existed
Adobe Dreamweaver, technically still exists, but is practically irrelevant for modern web development
Classic ASP as a mainstream platform. SharePoint actually started on this
Google Gears (2007–2010), offline web before service workers
CoffeeScript was going to replace JavaScript (spoiler: it didn’t)
Google Web Toolkit, Java-to-JavaScript compilation, peak enterprise overthinking

The Hype Cycles SharePoint Ignored

This is where it gets interesting. These weren’t just products. They were movements. Entire conferences were built around them. Thought leaders declared them inevitable. And SharePoint just… kept going.

The mid-2000s:
– Web 2.0, the buzzword that launched a thousand startups (now it’s just “the web”)
– SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture), was going to be the foundation of everything
– Enterprise Service Bus, the middleware that would connect all systems forever
– SOAP & complex web services, replaced by REST, which SharePoint also adopted

The late 2000s / early 2010s:
– Second Life / Virtual Worlds, companies bought virtual office spaces; I’m not making this up
– Enterprise Social Networks, “Facebook for the office” was a real pitch that spawned multiple products, most of which are now gone or absorbed
– Portal Servers, IBM WebSphere Portal, Liferay, and others competed directly with SharePoint; most are niche now
– The Semantic Web / Web 3.0, Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision, still largely unrealised
– Ruby on Rails “will kill everything”, great framework, not a platform killer

The mid-2010s:
– Chatbots will replace all UIs (2016–2018 peak), they didn’t
– Google Glass / Smart Glasses (first wave), too early, too awkward
– 3D Printing as a consumer revolution, useful in specific industries, but not the revolution we were promised

The 2020s:
– Blockchain / Web3 for enterprise, NFTs, DAOs, decentralised everything; most enterprises passed
– The Metaverse (2021–2023), Meta bet billions; most companies bet nothing
– Low-code / no-code will replace developers, still being proclaimed, still not happening at the scale predicted
– Big Data as a standalone concept, now it’s just “data”

Even Microsoft’s Own Technologies

Perhaps the most telling list is what SharePoint outlasted within Microsoft itself:

Windows Phone / Windows Mobile, gone
Internet Explorer (1995–2022), finally retired
Microsoft BPOS, predecessor to Office 365, now forgotten
Yammer as a standalone product, acquired and absorbed into Viva Engage
SharePoint Designer (2007–2026), replaced FrontPage as the tool for customising SharePoint sites and building workflows. The last version, SharePoint Designer 2013, reaches the end of support in July 2026. No successor was ever released
Delve (2014–2024), formally retired in December 2024 after never gaining meaningful adoption
MSN Messenger / Windows Live Messenger, replaced by Skype, which Teams then overshadowed
Windows Vista, Windows 8, let’s not talk about those

My Prediction: It Will Survive the Copilot Hype Too

I’ll go on record: SharePoint will outlast the current AI and Copilot hype cycle as well.

Don’t get me wrong. Copilot is useful, and AI will change how we work with content and data. But we’ve seen this pattern before. A new technology gets layered on top of SharePoint, the hype peaks, expectations adjust, and SharePoint remains underneath, storing the documents, running the intranets, powering the workflows.

Remember when Power Platform was going to make SharePoint customization unnecessary? When Teams was going to make SharePoint invisible? SharePoint is still where the data lives. Power Platform triggers its flows from SharePoint lists and libraries. Teams uses SharePoint as its backend storage. The tools changed, but the foundation didn’t. I expect the same with Copilot: the AI features will mature, the hype will cool, and SharePoint will remain the backbone that makes it all work.

And here’s another prediction: information architecture in SharePoint will be just as important after Copilot as it is today—maybe more. AI can only work with what it finds, and if your content is poorly structured, poorly labelled, and scattered across sites with no coherent taxonomy, Copilot won’t magically fix that. Good information architecture isn’t something AI replaces. It’s what makes AI useful in the first place.

A twenty-five-year survival instinct is hard to bet against. SharePoint is basically the Bear Grylls of enterprise software. It doesn’t matter what you throw at it; it finds a way to adapt, eat whatever’s available, and keep moving.

What Does This Tell Us?

SharePoint’s survival isn’t about being the best at any one thing. It’s about being deeply embedded in how organisations work. It’s the platform that handles document management, intranets, workflows, compliance, and a hundred other enterprise needs, all connected to Entra ID, Teams, Outlook, and the rest of the Microsoft ecosystem.

Every few years, a new competitor or product enters the market claiming that SharePoint is dying. And every few years, SharePoint proves them wrong. It’s changing, from on-premises to cloud, from web parts to SharePoint Framework (SPFx), from classic to modern, but it’s not going anywhere.

As someone who works at the intersection of design and development in the Microsoft 365 space, I find this both reassuring and challenging. Reassuring because the platform we built on has proven its staying power. Challenging because “it’s not going anywhere” also means we need to keep pushing it forward. Not just to match what’s considered modern today, but to build for what will still feel modern tomorrow. That distinction matters, and I don’t always see it reflected in SharePoint’s design decisions. Catching up is not the same as lasting.

That’s what drives projects like hTWOo and why I keep writing about design systems, modern CSS, and front-end craft in the SharePoint context. The platform survived 25 years. The question is: can we make the next 25 look as good as they function?

What technology on this list surprised you most? Or did I miss one? Let me know. I’d love to hear what you’ve seen come and go in your SharePoint journey.